Targeted Therapy and Personalized Medicine for Sarcoma
Dr. Dina Lev: So we are now in the current era, in the era of targeted therapy and hopefully personalized medicine, in which we will treat a patient based on the molecular arrangement that is specific to a tumor. Gleevec is really the best example (and GIST): in that context we have made a huge difference and huge progress in these tumors.
However, one of the things that's emerging as we're treating patients with Gleevec is that some of the patients do develop, with time, resistance to therapy. I think the basis for this resistance is the fact that sarcomas, like other cancers, are a genetically unstable disease. So as the tumor progresses, it develops additional genetic changes. In the case of GIST, what we find is that there are more (other) mutations that then drive this resistance to the Gleevec. Similarly I assume we'll have the same with other targets, so we have to continuously study what is going on in these tumors as we treat them.